Trump's Trials - Trump's DOJ makes its most sweeping demand for election data yet

Episode Date: June 16, 2025

The U.S. Department of Justice is demanding an unprecedented amount of election data from at least one state, according to documents obtained by NPR, as the DOJ transformed by the Trump administration reviews cases targeting the president's political allies and caters to his desire to exert more power over state voting processes.Support NPR and hear every episode of Trump's Terms sponsor-free with NPR+. Sign up at plus.npr.org.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Trump's Terms from NPR. I'm Scott Detro. We're going to be doing all sorts of things nobody ever thought was even possible. President Trump has brought back strength to the White House. We can't just ignore the president's desires. This will be an entirely different country in a short period of time. Every episode of Trump's Terms, we bring you NPR's latest coverage of the 47th president, with a focus on actions and policies he is pursuing on his own terms and in the process, taking the presidency into uncharted territory.

Today's story starts right after this. On NPR's Thru Line, the firemen kept shouting to them not to jump, but they had no other choice. Frances Perkins witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire that changed everything. She was the first woman in a U.S. cabinet created social security and the 40-hour work week. The woman behind the New Deal on NPR's ThruLine, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey Martinez, last month, President Trump's Department of Justice made a sweeping demand

to the state of Colorado. Give us all your records from recent federal elections. Voting officials say they've never seen anything like it. NPR's Miles Parks and Jude Jaffe Block were the first to obtain this data request. So Jude, let's start off with you. Tell us more about what's happening here. Well, yeah, last month, the Justice Department

sent the Colorado Secretary of State a letter citing a number of federal laws, including those that say election officials need to keep relevant records for 22 months after an election. DOJ said they received a complaint about Colorado's compliance with election law and they're requesting all records from the past 22 months as a result. But this request goes even further back to preserve any 2020 election records Colorado has, even though there isn't a legal obligation for state officials to have saved those old records at this point. All right, so requests for both 2020 and 2024. Miles, how rare is this? I mean, no voting official we've spoken with has ever heard of a request for all election records from an entire state. I mean, depending on how you read this, election law experts

told us it could encompass ballots, voter registration materials to equipment. Justin Levitt is a professor at Loyola Law School. He worked for DOJ during the Obama administration and he was a voting advisor in the Biden administration. I've never seen a request that says, you have a responsibility to keep everything. We're investigating whether you kept everything. So send us everything. Has the Department of Justice said anything about this request so far publicly or maybe in response to your reporting?

It hasn't. We got no comment on the substance of the request and the DOJ also has not provided a copy of the initial complaint What about the letter any explanation as to why they want all these records? Not exactly. I mean, we don't know anything about that initial complaint who's senate what the specifics are But election officials in colorado note the last time that a state records retention issue was in the spotlight Involved a trump ally who's become a sort of election denial folk hero. You might remember her name, Tina Peters.

She's a former county voting official who was convicted on a bunch of crimes related to giving unauthorized access to her systems after the 2020 election. As part of her defense in her trial, she accused the Secretary of State of illegally ordering records to be deleted. That accusation was never substantiated,

but election officials in Colorado see this request from DOJ as in some way linked to be deleted. That accusation was never substantiated, but election officials in Colorado see this request from DOJ as in some way linked to that case. All right. So just to be clear then, anything in the DOJ's letter that mentions Peters, or is that maybe just a hunch among people in Colorado? There's nothing in the letter, but it's also worth noting that just a week before Colorado got this letter, President Trump posted a long social media post where he called Peters a political prisoner and even directed DOJ to take quote, all necessary

action to help get her free even though she's in state custody. And when we spoke with Colorado's Secretary of State, Democrat Jenna Griswold, she noted the timing that this request came soon after Trump's post. Though she's not sure why DOJ ultimately wants all her records, she is worried they'll be used to make false accusations about the state's voting systems. We are seeing them use the apparatus

of the federal government to undermine our elections and our democracy, and I would assume that this is more of the same. In response to the request, the state provided DOJ with a couple different snapshots of its publicly available voter rolls and a more detailed voter history. But it's unclear whether DOJ will be satisfied with that considering how broad the request was.

Jude, I mean, what does this data request then say about the focus of Trump's Department of Justice? Yeah, the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, which includes the voting section, is really undergoing a dramatic transformation right now to home in on Trump's priorities. We've seen DOJ lawyers drop voting rights lawsuits brought under Biden and instead focus on searching for fraud or how states are verifying voters on their roles. One of our colleagues reported that the Civil Rights Division has lost about 70% of its attorneys.

The key person to note here is the head of the Civil Rights Division has lost about 70% of its attorneys. The key person to note here is the head of the Civil Rights Division, Hermit Dillon. She's the one who signed this request to Colorado. And Dillon frankly has a history of working in the election denial space. She advised Trump's legal team in 2020 and also worked for Carrie Lake's campaign in Arizona in 2022, both campaigns that involved casting doubt on election results. And then up until the time she was confirmed, Dillon was working at her own private firm, which was also commissioned by the Republican National Committee this spring to send out election records requests across the country.

A secretary of state not in Colorado, but who got one of those requests, told me she was getting flashbacks to the post-2020 period when voting officials really felt targeted more than ever before. That's NPR's Miles Parks and Jude Joppie Block. Thanks you two. Thank you. Thanks. Before we wrap up, a reminder, you can find more coverage of the Trump administration

on the NPR Politics Podcast, where you can hear NPR's political reporters break down the day's biggest political news with new episodes every weekday afternoon. And thanks as always to our NPR Plus supporters who hear every episode of the show without sponsor messages. You can learn more at plus.npr.org. I'm Scott Detrow. Thanks for listening to Trump's terms from NPR.